Репрессивная политика СССР в отношении отдельных народов в годы Великой Отечественной войны (на примере болгар Урала)

Abstract

The article is devoted to studying Russian Bulgarians living in the Urals in the 1940s with the help of archive materials of the Chelyabinsk and Sverdlovsk regions as well as Perm Krai. During the Great Patriotic War the USS Rcitizens of Bulgarian origin, like many other peoples, were subject to repressions which meant enrollment in labour army and deporting every single Bulgarian of the Crimea. As a result of the semeasures, a significant number of Bulgarians were moved to the territory of the modern Urals. The deported Bulgarians settled in areas of logging (forest exploitation) in the north of Molotov and Sverdlovsk regions, and members of the labour army were employed in the trust organization «Chelyabmetallurgstroi». The Bulgarians were deported along with other peoples of the Crimea. They did not form compact settlement in the new areas but managed to preserve their traditional culture. Some families were even able to organize permanent lodging in the Urals, pursue a career and contribute to the development of the region. The author is convinced that the judicial legal documents kept in archives as well as field trip research results may serve as a significant but not sufficiently appreciated source of investigating the history of deporting Russian Bulgarians. The topicality of the sources grew after the year 2020 when the 75-years’ period of storing documents of the year 1945 expired. Autobiographies, biographic information, interrogation protocols enable to obtain a detailed reconstruction of deportation circumstances and the process of enrollment into labour army, and to see these events through the prism of the repressed people themselves. Researching the history of repression, inparticular – repression of the Bulgarians – has revealed how complex and controversial the policy of the soviet state towards certain peoples during the Great Patriotic War was.